Team Management

Creating the tech leaders of tomorrow from the graduates of today

How do you ensure the progression and development of your rising stars, whilst simultaneously maintaining quality and meeting deadlines for deliverables?

It can be a delicate balance, but the two are not mutually exclusive. The fact is, if you want to allow your junior staff room to grow, sometimes it’s necessary to delegate responsibility and take your hands off the steering wheel – even if only for a moment.

The relationship between a mentor and a mentee is complex, and it’s one of the fundamental aspects of what drives no-more’s collaborative and supportive environment.

We spoke to the CTO and one of his mentees about their experiences of working together at no-more.

“I first discovered coding in high school, when we had a course on plain HTML and CSS development. It was the first time I got my hands on any kind of programming, and I’ve loved it ever since.

There are lots of things that I enjoy about working at no-more but probably my favourite thing is my working relationship with Anders.

I’m allowed all the freedom I want, providing I get the job done, and that’s been really helpful for me in expanding my knowledge of coding and learning to be more creative.

It is also a matter of being persistent: you learn the basics during your studies, but here, I spend a great deal of my time working on solutions to the new problems that inevitably occur.

When you face a problem, you can either be discouraged and give up, or be stubborn and work until it is resolved. As a developer, giving up isn’t an option because the platform has to work, plain and simple.

A huge amount of the no-more site was created by me from the ground up – I’m always working on something new, and I’m really proud of what I do.

I’ve learned a lot from Anders, but probably the biggest skill I’ve gained since starting at NoMore is being able to code in Laravel; it was a completely new coding language when I first started, and now I feel comfortable that I could pretty much take on any task I've given.

I’m good at learning new techniques on the fly, and the really great thing about no-more is that I’m free to do that - it’s pretty cool to know that if I want to have a go at something new, nobody is going to hold me back.”

Anders Thomsen, CTO, CEO & Founder

Years of coding experience: Coding VBA(Excel) and SAS for 3 years (part of Finance degree and student job), web development for 2+ years

Strongest skill: A good understanding of the Laravel framework and OOP

Weakest skill: “I’m probably too impatient sometimes and I expect to see my own work ethic mirrored in all of my employees. Martin seems to handle that pressure well though.”

Anders says:

“I love my job. I started this company to help business professionals with their daily workload but I also love the human element of the job – the fact that I get to work with so many talented people.

I’m surrounded every day by a great, hard-working team and we spend our time building really cool stuff that is impacting businesses and people all around the world.

Being a mentor is a really rewarding experience, and I see it very much as a two-way street. It’s never been about me just teaching Martin, I’ve also learned a lot of cool stuff from him – including some really handy front-end development tips and tricks. We’re a good team, and we’ve built some pretty fundamental parts of no-more’s infrastructure together.

The best two pieces of business advice I ever received were ‘it’s not about how smart you are, but how hard you work’ and ‘it’s all about the people’ – and I would say that nowhere are either of those truer than here at no-more.”